[Infrastructures] Re: How do you manage 1000+ systems

[John Borwick]

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Ken Beer wrote:
> Does anyone have any experience with xCAT, wareWulf or wareCAT ( xCAT
> using wareWulf)?  It's supposedly a way of managing 10000+ nodes by
> diskless booting linux images. Here's the presentation I just heard:
> sense.net/~egan/diskless.ppt

We use xCAT some.  Wake Forest University is a big IBM partner, and
large parts of xCAT were designed for IBM clusters/servers.  You can do
things like

 rpower <group> off
 dsh <group> command

There are perhaps some provisions for doing remote BIOS updates, too,
and--to be more general--remote boots to arbitrary kernel images.

I decided to stop using xCAT in favor of my own
PXE/DHCP/kickstart/cfengine environment.  xCAT is mainly proprietary,
and one guy--Egan Ford--does most of the work on the project.

Yours,
John
-- 
           John Borwick      | work              +1 336 758 2507
       Systems Analyst Lead  | cell              +1 336 391 6623
      Wake Forest University | web  http://www.wfu.edu/~borwicjh
      Winston-Salem, NC, USA | GPG key ID             0x797326D5

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